Okay, so what's the deal about a "Great Schism" that has occurred? I hear half-whispers about it.

[...] the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.-Darwin

Well, I haven't heard of anything called the great schism, but I think I might know what you are talking about. As you might know Auntie Dee Dee was the top admin of the forums for a good long time. But a few months ago, Bobby Henderson himself, the head honcho, came around, and he thought that Auntie Dee Dee was being a little too strict with the forum, so he removed her from her post. She, as well as other moderators and members, left the forums altogether. Many of them went to the Toadfish Monastery, which I can tell ya'll about later. I'd call it more of an exodus than a schism though. But this might not be what you're talking about at all.

Duke

"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

--Mark Twain

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

Maybe with a chism more people will take FSM seriously! Well, after all this movement is built on people sharing more or less the same convictions, and some tend to be stricter than others, for the good of the cause, I'd say.

Well, what happened was based on people and actions instead of values, like most schisms. When I say Auntie Dee Dee was strict as the administrator, I'm just saying that she kept forum things more tightly regulated, and Bobby thought it was a little too far.

Duke

"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

--Mark Twain

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

that is to say, spontaneous removal of admin powers before any sort of complaint to DD (from bobby).

~Qwerty

The way I heard it, Bobby had already gotten plenty of complaints about DD. Apparently, Bobby had been working on this for months. And apparently, he didn't give DD a warning, but I suppose he apparently thought that she didn't need one. But it did seem awfully abrupt at the time.

Duke

"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

--Mark Twain

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

Ah shucks, I thought maybe a REAL schism was happening, like splitting into fundamentalism ("cheese from a green can is strictly forbidden!") and moral reletivism ("it's not real parmesan, but it's so good, and no one gets hurt!").

I think when we start to split into factions it will mean Pastafarianism will have truly arrived - it's worked for Christians, Muslims and Jews. But I don't know whether it will ever happen, because our god has one key fault in this regard; he makes his expectations quite clear (see the Rather You Didn'ts). In order to split into different sects you need to have a god with a communication problem - one who can't make his expectations clear, thus leading to endless debate and schisms and ultimately different sects. We are 'cursed', in a sense, with a perfect diety, and we will never have the benefits of a good ole religious schism.